Herb and Bacon Cornbread Stuffing

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. There is no such thing as a mistake; there is only an opportunity for improvement. When one door closes, another one opens; or when one door closes, crack a window! Sage advice, all of it. And speaking of sage - how about some stuffing? Okay, bad segue, but it all comes together in the end, I promise. (There I go again with the advice!)

Basically, it's like this. I love cornbread, and I've shared my love for it with you guys many times. This time, however, is different because that piece of sunny, jalapeno-speckled hunk of grainy goodness below? It was terrible. I won't even point you to the recipe because I'd be ashamed to share it with you. I should have known, really, that cornbread can't be made low-fat and be made to taste good at the same time. No oil? No butter? No cheese? No way. Er, not again, that is. (Do as I say; not as I do. Every parent should have that one in their arsenal.)



My first inclination was to crumble it and feed it to the birds. They're hungry, my heart said, but it's wasteful, shouted my brain! And in fact it would be wasteful to throw out an entire recipe of cornbread, especially these days when the price of food is going up, up, up and our paychecks are going down, down, down (or so it seems, anyway.) A penny saved is a penny earned, I thought, and that's when it hit me: stuffing! Chicken stock and butter and spices can make anything better so I started searching for something I'd never made: cornbread stuffing from scratch. We love stuffing in our family, and I'm not ashamed to admit that we eat the boxed stuff. A lot. It's so easy! So quick!

But you know what? So was this, and after making it from scratch I doubt the boxed stuff makes much of an appearance on our table anymore.

Live and learn, I say. Live and learn.

Gourmet's Herb and Bacon Cornbread Stuffing